MINUTES OF THE MEETING OF THE COMMITTEE ON
EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

October 12-13, 2000

National Science Foundation
4201 Wilson Boulevard
Arlington, VA 22230

Thursday, October 12, 2000

Welcome, Introductions and Opening Remarks

Dr. Gary May, Chair, opened the meeting at 8:30 am. Members were welcomed and then they introduced themselves. Opening remarks included the announcement of Suzanne Brainard as Vice-Chair, announcement of five new members for the Committee, and a report of the recent Advisory Committee Chairs’ meeting held September 29, 2000, resulting in three issues for later discussion: best measures of performance of NSF’s research and education activities, advice about increasing the NSF’s budget, and best practices of CEOSE.

Report of Executive Council Liaison

Mr. John Wilkinson, Executive Liaison, commented on his past activities with CEOSE and expressed his pleasure in serving as Executive Liaison. He announced that Dr. Michelle McMurry will be the new Executive Secretary. He shared that in his new role in the Director’s Office, he will be involved in a strategic examination of workforce initiatives and workforce planning for the Foundation. He informed the group about several Executive Orders dealing with various underrepresented groups and pointed out that NSF is very active in terms in attending meetings and providing input (e.g., report of the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans, town meetings regarding Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders). He also discussed the emphasis of the Government Accounting Office (GAO) on human capital. Human capital is viewed as an asset to be developed and accounted for in terms of productivity.

NSF Workforce Initiative

Dr. Joseph Bordogna, Deputy Director of NSF, expressed warm greetings from the Director’s Office. He applauded and underscored the role of Advisory Committees in helping NSF to think strategically in designing and implementing programs and initiatives that enable the nation’s future through discovery, learning and innovation.

Dr. Bordogna described that the strategic thrusts of the Workforce Initiative are to invest in intellectual capital, to integrate research into education, and to promote partnerships. Additionally, this effort must be synergistic in attending to the disciplinary, educational, and social issues. While noting current programs across the various directorates that contribute to incremental improvement in the SMET workforce, he emphasized that the Workforce Initiative needs to push the frontier in a collective fashion, being responsive to the inclusion of more sophisticated instrumentation, different sets of intellectual skills, and underrepresented populations. He discussed the center strategy/construct as an optional paradigm shift and a cultural change in conceptualizing a synergistic framework for the Workforce Initiative.

Directorate Dialogue: ENG

Dr. Bert Marsh, Deputy Assistant Director for the Directorate for Engineering, provided an overview of the organization of the directorate; implementation of the merit review criteria; efforts related to the 21st century workforce; diversity among staff, reviewers, awardees, and the Advisory Committee, and education efforts across the pipeline. The reports of the Committee of Visitors have recommended that ENG provide more explicit instructions to the principal investigators and the reviewers to help them use the merit review criteria more aggressively. Dr. Marsh stated that enhanced attention is being directed at the use of the merit review criteria, largely due to Foundation-wide efforts like the Dear Colleague letter that was distributed to the community regarding the merit review criteria, the additional language about the integration of research and education and diversity that have been appended to the merit review criteria, and the revision of the review form to ensure that reviewers address both merit review criteria. The Directorate has also asked the program officers to address specifically both criteria when they are meeting with their panels and to address both criteria in the preparation of funding recommendations. He also noted that all programs in some sense address workforce issues (e.g., training of undergraduate and graduate students, working with the K-12 community in helping young people to consider engineering careers). He stressed that ENG has several different models of the center concept that may be instructive in current efforts to address the workforce for the 21st century issue.

Dr. Marsh shared the diversity composition of the professional ENG staff: of the 80 professionals, 22 are female, 4 African Americans, 2 Hispanics, and 13 Asians. The Advisory Committee for the Directorate consists of 20 members, including 5 women, 3 African Americans, 2 Hispanics, and 2 Asians. ENG has tracked the reviewer diversity base for three years in one program area that cuts across five of the six divisions. In the CAREER program, results indicated a downward trend and ENG is making Division Directors responsible for ensuring that panel diversity is improved. Regarding proposers and awardees, the success rate is 25 percent for women and 24 percent for underrepresented minorities. Several outreach efforts were noted to increase the number of female and minority principal investigators: working with minority professional societies; supporting international collaborations in Mexico and South Africa, and conducting a workshop for new professors in the civil and mechanical engineering disciplines where people from underrepresented communities participate in sub-workshops on writing proposals and how to work with NSF.

Dr. Marsh described several education outreach efforts across the pipeline. The Engineering Education Coalition focuses on engineering education reform and will be transitioning to “Action Agenda,” designed to disseminate ideas developed in the coalitions and to develop new curricula in emerging technologies. Combined Research and Curriculum Development infuses new research developments into the curriculum. Research Experiences for Teachers involve teachers of elementary, middle, and high school students in the research process and help K-12 teachers introduce the ideas of engineering to that community and enhance their teaching practices. Graduate fellowships are provided to women graduate students in engineering through ENG involvement in the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeships (IGERT) Program and the upcoming ADVANCE Program.

The Glenn Commission: Status Report

Dr. Linda Rosen, Executive Director of The National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century (chaired by Senator John Glenn and became known as the Glenn Commission), stated that we know a lot more about what has to happen to really deliver an excellent K-12 mathematics and science education and discussed the issues and recommendation in the Commission’s report, Before It’s Too Late. The Commission focused on teachers and she noted the following situations/issues: a quarter of high school math teachers do not even have a minor in mathematics and about 20 percent of high school science teachers do not have a minor in science; students who live in rural districts and in inner cities have less than a 50 percent chance of getting a science teacher who have a license to teach with a minor; mathematics and science teachers report more job dissatisfaction than other teachers; and teachers earn 29 percent less than other workers with a baccalaureate degree. In developing a vision and a set of strategies that need to be put in place to insure high quality K-12 mathematics and science teaching, the Commission focused on the need to attract a diverse group of teachers and preparing them with superb experiences, the need to address retention issue, and the need to view teachers as “continuous learners.” The Commission is calling for the following:

• Every state to conduct a needs assessment of the state’s teaching force
• Implementation of a series of summer institutes that are tailored to those most pressing and critical issues
• Creation of “inquiry groups” to facilitate colleagues working together face to face and/or electronically
• Additional funds to upgrade the Internet Portals
• Training of teacher leaders in mathematics and science
• Reward system that would go to schools that have put in place a program of high quality professional development that is also yielding higher student achievement schoolwide
• Exemplary models of teacher preparation programs that will use federal funds to give full tuition scholarships to high school students to attract them to these institutions to go into mathematics and science teaching
• Recruitment of different groups to math/science teaching careers: high school students, college students in their early years, post-baccalaureate degree holders
• Loan forgiveness for 20% of the loan for up to five years for those who teach in a shortage area
• 15 teaching academies with one in each of the 10 federal regions and 5 others strategically located and designed to provide a high quality one year program for people who have a great deal of content knowledge but not a lot of experience in how to teach young people, to offer $30,000 stipend to “fellows” who would be expected to teach in high need area
• $10,000 in federal funds to be matched by district funds to set up an induction program if the district hires a grad from one of the teaching academies, helping to pave the way for new mathematics and science teachers
• Partnering with business for summer internship for teachers to keep their skills up-to-date
• Career ladder, recognizing high quality teachers and keeping them in the classroom

GEO Diversity Workshop Report

Dr. Jewell Prendeville, Program Coordinator in the Division of Atmospheric Sciences of the Geosciences Directorate(GEO), discussed the Directorate’s efforts to examine the issue of why so few minorities chose the GEO sciences as a major and as a career. The activities included compiling relevant demographic statistics, documenting exemplary programs at NSF and other federal agencies, having discussions with professional organizations, conducting an e-mail survey of the field, and convening a workshop framed around the briefing book that included the outcomes of each activity. Frequently mentioned responses to the concern of why minority students do not choose GEO sciences included: lack of awareness or information about the career opportunities in the GEO sciences, no role models, other attractive and lucrative career options, and family pressures to choose more traditional careers. Workshop participants encouraged outreach at the community level and the K-12 level. Currently, GEO is drafting a strategic plan for addressing the problem(s) that outlines the goals and objectives, the types of activities, and education levels to target, and places a strong emphasis on collaboration and assessment of program outcomes.

CAWMSET Report

The Chair, Dr May, and liaison to the Congressional Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering and Technology Development (CAWMSET) distributed Executive Summary of the CAWMSET report and encouraged members to visit the CAWMSET website. He gave a brief report about the press conference held in July 2000 and pointed out that the report calls for the creation of a body that would oversee the activities suggested.

Directorate Advisory Committee Liaison Reports

Members were informed about upcoming Advisory Committee meetings. Liaisons were encouraged to attend and reminded to prepare a brief written report to share with CEOSE members.

Directorate Dialogue: MPS

Dr. Henry Blount, Head of the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, provided an overview of the Directorate and addressed the concerns raised by CEOSE. Dr. Blount stated that the community (e.g., reviewers) are becoming more responsive, more robust, and more forthcoming in speaking to Criterion II with time. He pointed out the Chemistry Division has taken the lead in designing and implementing a study to see what can be learned from examining Criteria II utilization. This study began in FY99 and will be continued in FY01. He shared that the Directorate makes extremely energetic efforts to recruit broadly, noting that the candidate pool in certain disciplines is greater than in others. The proposal success rate for female principal investigators is about 14 percent and for minority principal investigators, 3-4 percent. Dr. Blount shared that efforts to increase the proportion of minority researchers include the provision of planning grants to help them develop stronger proposals. He also noted that a report on women in the chemical workforce is forthcoming and that a workshop on diversity in the chemical sciences is being planned with professional societies. The Mathematics Division was highlighted for their efforts in increasing panel diversity. Program directors are informed that panel involvement needs to include underrepresented individuals, junior investigators (four to ten years past their degree), and someone from an undergraduate institution. He pointed out that Centers served as the platform to tap the research investment for educational purposes. For example, the Magnetic Lab was highlighted for its web-based instruction and its teacher workshops, reaching approximately 300,000 students a year.

CEOSE 2000 Biennial Report

Dr. May stressed the importance of completing the report by December 2000, reminding members to complete the draft and its review in a timely fashion. He reminded members to submit testimonials and vignette to make the report come alive. The members reviewed what was in the report, focusing on issues like resources for enhancing diversity, policies for embedding diversity, SMET working conditions and economic rewards of being a scientist, and assessment of the diversity portfolio. The members engaged in a working session to draft recommendations for the report.

Friday, October 13, 2000

Dr. Norman Fortenberry, Acting Division Director of Human Resource Development in EHR, provided the context for developing a research base on access and participation. He stated that there is a need to move from randomly assessing pieces to having a more purposeful, rigorous, coherent research base for programs and practices. He also provided examples of questions that needed to be addressed by research: How do we attract minorities in community college into baccalaureate programs? What barriers impede progression to the professorate, and how can they be overcome? Are there differential impacts of financial, institutional, and social variables due to minority status? He underscored that the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was funded to identify gaps and overlaps and to prioritize research areas based on programmatic need.

Ms. Yolanda George, Assistant Deputy Director at AAAS, provided a summary of what is known about the following research areas: choice of SMET undergraduate majors, preparation of both SMET and non-SMET majors, impact of undergraduate admission tests and college admission issues, academic achievement and progression at the undergraduate and graduate SMET levels, and transition points. She raised the following issues: who is doing the research (very few minority researchers), quality of the research base, relationship between remedial courses and degree attainment, critical role of community colleges, the need to study graduate school SMET departmental climate, deeper examination of patterns of attrition or patterns of graduation to look at interactions, influence of market forces on graduate programs. She stressed the need for long-term and more systematic studies in addressing issues and translating research into better practice. Ms. George emphasized the need for better explanations of how race, gender, SES and ability differentially relate to issues of underrepresentation in SMET.

Meeting with Deputy Director

Dr. Bordogna encouraged CEOSE to continue to provide advice in the areas of the workforce initiative, improving SMET climate, and program accountability. He highlighted interagency and NSF efforts focused on persons with disabilities, underscoring heightened attention to inclusiveness, accessibility and connectivity. The discussion also included the need for NSF to attend to limited information in SMET databases regarding persons with disabilities. Other issues discussed included the center construct and other approaches for the Workforce Initiative and public awareness and image of NSF. Dr. Bordogna presented a certificate of appreciation to Dr. Bernice Anderson for her tenure as Executive Secretary.

Business Meeting

Dr. May announced that the next meeting is scheduled for February 22-23, 2001. He also shared that the term of several members will be ending in FY 2001. The minutes were approved with edits. Members reiterated the importance of the need for good data, long-term tracking of NSF PIs like CAREER and Presidential Awardees, and the need for NSF to conduct a PR campaign targeting the general public. Agenda items for future meeting(s) included: status of the recommendations from the 98 CEOSE report, presentations from two directorates, data on research assistantships, SRS databases, FASTLANE, legal issues and diversity. Members provided input for the letter to the Director that will summarize the meeting and respond to concerns regarding the measuring of NSF performance, reasons for increasing the budget, and best practices of the committee. CEOSE members identified the following as their best practices: biennial report, composition of the committee, and a letter to the executive level of NSF that summarizes the outcomes of the CEOSE meetings. Members were reminded to complete their tasks and review of the CEOSE 2000 report.

The meeting adjourned at 1:35pm.

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